COATESVILLE — Where many saw rough edges, grit and grime, industrial artist Klaus Guido Grutzka often created light and airy paintings that are full of color.

Grutzka, who lived from 1922 to 2011, regularly painted the sharp angles and straight lines of factories. Many might consider his subjects as typically utilitarian industrial sites, including the mills and furnaces of the former Lukens Steel site that he regularly painted.

Graystone Society’s National Iron & Steel Heritage Museum recently purchased from Grutzka’s family more than 1,000 paintings and much of his paints and tools, while intending to recreate his studio.

Art is jammed from wall to wall and piled nearly floor to ceiling at the society’s Old Lukens Executive Office Building at 50 S. First Ave. in the Lukens National Historic District.

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During World War II, the plant employed more than 7,000 men and women. Today, the site is owned by ArcelorMittal SA. The steelmaker employs 890 workers in the Coatesville plant and is part of the world’s largest steel manufacturer.

Grutzka, a former engineering student and prisoner of war while serving in the German Navy, was on the Bethlehem Steel Co. payroll and painted there as well as in Coatesville, at Phoenix Steel in Phoenixville and dozens of other industrial sites in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Grutzka worked primarily in pencil, oil, watercolor, pen, pastels and through photography. He designed posters, contributed to magazines and his work graced the covers of annual reports for several companies, including John Deere, Union Carbide Co. and Kelloggs. He was an assistant professor at the Hill School in Pottstown in the Art Department and then concentrated on painting for the last 20 years of his life.

Gene DiOrio is a founding member of the Graystone Society and a former Lukens Steel worker.

Scott Huston is the great, great, great, great grandson of Lukens Steel founder Rebecca Lukens and said that the society’s purchase of the Grutzka Collection was like discovering a “gold mine.”

“We want to tell the industrial story,” Huston said. “This is Pennsylvania’s and the nation’s industrial story. The industrial landscape — for better or worse — is disappearing in America. To take the visual landscape, and translate to paper, takes you to that world.”

James D. Ziegler, the Graystone Society’s National Iron and Steel Heritage Museum executive director, is excited by the acquisition.

“We were contacted by the family of Klaus Grutzka,” Ziegler said. “They were familiar that he painted the mills and furnaces of Lukens Steel. They wondered if we were interested in acquiring all or some of his collection. We immediately saw the collection’s significance to the iron and steel industry we exhibit here at the museum.”

Lukens produced steel used in many U.S. Navy ships, the supports for the World Trade Center, many trains, tanks and even Seattle’s Space Needle and the St. Louis Arch, according to Sharon Tandarich, property manager of the Graystone and a 40-year employee for Lukens Steel.

The society will display much of the Grutzka Industrial Art Collection at the Coatesville Country Club, 143 Reservoir Road, on March 21, one week shy of the second anniversary of the artist’s death.

The event is open to the public.

The museum, with steel site related displays and located in the historic district, is open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. For more information on the upcoming event or the society’s busy event schedule, or to visit the museum, go to www.steelmuseum.org

Part of the immense collection will be on display at The Coatesville Country Club, 143 Reservoir Rd, Coatesville on March 21 when the Rebecca Lukens Award is presented, one week shy of the second anniversary of the artist’s passing.